Entries from April 2011

We were very privileged to have a panel of incredible people with us today to talk about Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD).

A huge thanks to Bill Shelton, Marc Esher, Michael Labriola and Sandy Mamoli for agreeing to join us, and participating in one of the most interesting, and thought provoking discussions on Agile process and Test Driven Development I've every been a party to.

We discuss testing from a variety of angles, why is it good, what are good ways to implement it, automation, how it factors into your process, as well as talking about the Agile process in general, how it can fit into certain organisations and business structures, and what problems its attempting to solve.

Starting off this conversation, we discuss Mark's (and probably soon Kai's) addiction to Spiral Knights, which is an incredibly simple and fun Diablo style freemium cross platform MMO (Friend Mark as 'Neurotic', if you play too).

Kai takes us through his experience at WebDU this year, and talks about how much he enjoyed the conference. We have a good discussion about his presentation on developing for mobile platforms, ranging from phones to tablets, and the pros and cons to different approaches.

The Amazon outage (which is still ongoing) becomes an interesting topic, and diverges into discussion about decentralised version control (i.e. what happens when your source control repo is stored on a server that goes down).

Another long episode! We have a long and winding discussion about running and developing for ColdFusion on platforms other than Windows - generally speaking, Linux (Ubuntu, Mark) and Mac (Kai), which takes us well into how we set up our local development environments. Details like how we use virtual machines, what Eclipse plugins we use, version control clients and the like are talked about as well.

Late to the party, we have a talk about the ol' cfscript vs cftag debate, and how we feel about how people can format their code. Surprisingly no fireballs were thrown in this exchange, as usually this tends to provoke incredibly heated discussions! As we all know, which line a { goes on, is very important stuff!

Lastly, we talk about the recent broo-ha-ha over whether or not open source developers should be taking donations (Spoiler: we tend to side on the "if you give stuff away for free, do what you like" camp).

And lastly, we put a call out for more people to comment on this site to our podcasts! We love the feedback and being able to interact with our audience, so please comment / send us any suggestions or questions that you have, we'd be happy to talk about them.